28 Days

The Nikon 28mm f/2.8D. It's not a popular lens like the 50s or the 18–70 DX. Nor is it particularly well-regarded like the 70–200 VR or the 85mm f/1.4. It's really rather ordinary in fact, overshadowed by its big brother the f/1.4, costing six times as much.

So why is it that for the past two months it's been by far my most-used lens? There are times, of course, when it's not been enough, such as shooting the RDA Christmas disco where even f/1.8 at ISO 1600 still only gives a barely usable 1/40 shutter. Most other days, though, I'll head out the door with just the 28 on my D70 and sometimes the 50/1.8 in my coat pocket. It's nice to travel light.

To examine the 28 you'd think it wasn't worth considering. It's hardly flawless: at f/2.8 there's quite obvious light falloff (I can only imagine what it's like on 135 format!). Moreover at this aperture, and to a lesser extent f/4, it causes rather bad blue/purple fringes to appear on light–dark edges, enough to be visible even in small images:

Barrel distortion is pretty strong. The maximum aperture of f/2.8 limits the lens' use to daytime or well-lit interior (until a camera with decent 6400 ISO comes along). It hasn't got a fancy silent-wave motor. All in all it just doesn't seem a very impressive lens.

For many people these characteristics are unacceptable. For me the only thing that's stopped me using the 28 more is the f/2.8. The other issues—light falloff, blue fringes and barrel distortion—aren't really issues at all, in fact the falloff is something I like about this lens as it suits my style. The distortion is fixed in seconds with the free PTLens plugin while the fringes, although more time-intensive to fix, appear so infrequently as to make this characteristic largely irrelevant.

So what do I like about the 28? As mentioned already, the light falloff suits my style, helps to focus attention towards the centre of the image. The weight and size, too, make for a nice light walkaround setup that's certainly easier on the shoulder than an 18–70 (or gods forbid a 17–55). Then there's the focal length: almost a perfect normal, wide enough to encompass the average person's span of visual attention but not so much as to make the the rectilinear correction obvious. It's a natural-feeling focal length. The bokeh's not bad either; obviously since the aperture only opens up to f/2.8, and since the lens is a quite-short 28mm, it can't blur the background as much as a 50 or 85. But when it does blur, it blurs nicely with no harsh ringed circles or polygons (it's got a seven-blade iris). It's fairly consistent across the frame too, unlike for example the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 which can go weird in the corners. The 28 is also amazingly flare- and ghost-resistant, a feature especially noticeable coming from the 18–70 (“somewhere, over the rainbow...”) and the 50/1.8 (“who you gonna call?”).

All that is icing, though, on top of the real reasons I love my 28: its contrast and sharpness. Let's look at the latter first, since it's easier to explain. Put simply, it's sharp from wide open down to about f/11. By f/16 it's rather spoiled by diffraction but this doesn't bother me: for the type of shooting I do with it, an aperture this small is almost never used. In normal conditions the lens comfortably out-resolves my D70's sensor.

On to contrast. Here's where things get tricky, less easy to measure. Describing the contrast of a lens often involves rather emotive and unscientific terms like “delicate” and “beautiful”. Matters are not helped by my relative inexperience with lenses—I've only owned five and the first two were tiny 3× zooms on digital compacts. Nevertheless I shall try.

I'd describe the 28 as basically high contrast, again something that fits with my style. The image which really brought this home to me was, oddly enough, one of my cat:

At first I was using the 18–70 for its focal flexibility and, realising it wasn't defocussing the background as much as I'd like, thought to give the 28 a try. From the first couple of frames I noticed it even on the dinky 1.8” LCD: the black fur was blacker, shapes were better defined, the eyes clearer. I couldn't explain it in words at the time, still can't to my satisfaction, but I felt it, understood it on a primitive level: this lens was, is, something special. From then on I resolved to know the 28, to get a feel for what it could do, to explore its limitations. The process was complicated somewhat by the D70's multitude of image parameters, allowing very different results from the same scene and lens. Then there's raw and all their differing chemistries for developing. RawShooter's still my favourite for most things, for its workflow mostly but also because it does high contrast really well. Despite all the doors opened by raw I'm actually shooting in JPEG more than anything, simply because I like the way the D70 translates light into bits. Pixel-peepers bemoan the softness, the moiré, the noise blah blah blah but they're entirely missing the big picture (literally). My walls are adorned with lots of 15×10" prints from camera-generated JPEGs and things like sharpness and noise fade into insignificance. Old-fashioned concepts like composition, colour balance and overall contrast are what matter and the 28's character lens itself superbly to taking photographs that exemplify these, helped by the simple fact that it's a prime lens (see my article Of Limited Use (1) for more on this idea).

When a lens encourages the photographer to concentrate on the meaningful aspects of the art it essentially becomes transparent, like a good camera. It simply does its job unobtrusively, surely the hallmark of a good tool.

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